Photo Extravaganza

From SHF 2011

I really wanted to title this, "Happy Pi Day," but I'm a day late. It was a good pi day though, which I realized when I was calculating the diameter of the plywood rounds to cut for a new bed marker (11.5" - guess what circumference that makes...) Not only did I actually use pi yesterday in the normal course of my work, Kji just happened to have a little pecan pie with him that he shared with me at lunch. I love pie. And pi.

From SHF 2011

Since I haven't been so good about taking, and posting, photos recently, I made sure to take a few yesterday. It was a far more productive day than I was expecting. It's been so incredibly wet I wasn't expecting to get much done, but we did pick up our seed potato from Sauvie Island Organics, who were nice enough to receive our order (along with 5800lbs of seed for themselves and a bunch of other local farms). Our seed is certified organic and certified seed and it comes from Colorado. That's a long story, but I've been working with the grower for a number of years now, and he has good seed that is way, way cheaper than buying in small quantities from folks in Idaho or Washington. We're expect to plant about 50 lbs of seed this year, and we've set it out in the greenhouse to warm up and start "peeping" (the technical term I learned from the potato specialist at OSU).

From SHF 2011

Our starts are doing pretty well, and we actually had a part of a bed ready to go out in the field from last Monday's preparation so we plugged some spinach starts into the mud, covered them with row cover and crossed our fingers. This time of year it's just not pretty out in the field but we do what we can to get a few things in that we think might make it early in the spring. Last week's brassica seeding has already germinated and with a little luck we'll have early radishes and arugula.

From SHF 2011

The beds are nice and dry in the greenhouse. We plugged more of the spinach starts into a bed in the greenhouse and reseeded some hakurei turnips and carrots after the ones that we seeded in January failed to really do anything. I'm more and more tempted to give up and just cover the entire farm in plastic. Then I hear from my friend down in Southern Oregon that they lost a house to wind this weekend and I realize that nothing is perfect.